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As much as having multiple job offers can stroke the ego, it can also cause great anxiety.  Reasons vary for the root of this stress. People will often court a variety of job-seeking sources on the down low. A person might want to hold out for something better instead of settling on the first offer that comes. A fear of commitment might stall a person from taking pro-active action. Being sought after is a good problem to have, but if you don’t know how to play the field appropriately, your reputation could end up in the dog house and you might just let the best opportunity get away from you. Here is Part One with talent Manager, Trish Chua, who offers advice on how to best navigate the waters when there are plenty of fish trying to bite your line.

Question: Where are you specifically seeing that there is not enough talent to meet demand?

Trish Chua: Since we focus on the creative and everything that touches it, we are seeing an uptick in demand for usability — user experience designer, information architect, and even in some cases, user research. We are also experiencing a big demand for developers. Mobile is really hot right now. Everyone has a cell phone or a smart phone. A person who can design for mobile, the UI designer, or can code for iOS or Android is really in demand. The demand continues to grow in this city while the pool of talent gets narrower. 

Q: How should one juggle potential job offers versus actual written job offers? Meaning, you’ve been offered one job, but the one you really want says they’ll get back to you in another week.

Trish: What we tend to have happen with our candidates is that they may be juggling a couple opportunities, but haven’t actually interviewed for them yet. For example, when a hiring manager has expressed interest in the candidate and the candidate is considering the position. Or, when they are working with an agency in addition to searching independently for work. It’s in this space where things can get complicated. It feels counterintuitive, but when a candidate is looking at a couple of opportunities, or in the interviewing process, or close to accepting an offer — it’s really important that you keep in touch with your Talent Manager. Transparency is really important when working with an agency like ours.

Q: What if a person has accepted a job offer, but the job they really wanted finally reaches out with a job offer. How should this be handled?

Trish: Once you’ve accepted a job offer, you need to honor that commitment. If you are at that stage where you receive an offer, but you know there’s an opportunity you are waiting to hear back from — you should be honest about that, especially if you are working with an agency. The Talent Manager could actually help communicate to hiring managers for you if you are still interviewing for other jobs. Don’t accept an offer unless you are completely sure you want that gig. A candidate should never accept a job offer and then go back on it because it could come back to haunt you. Even if you handled the situation gracefully, hiring managers remember those experiences and could impact that company’s decision to work with you in the future. You also never know where that hiring manager could go next, so you could burn bridges because you didn’t have honest communication.

Q: Would the outcome be different if a person accepted an outside job offer, gave notice to their current company, to which they counter offered in order to keep that person. Is it understandable to back out of the outside job offer, or could you suffer the same repercussions?

Trish: We’ve run into that before where a candidate decides where they currently work is no longer a good fit for them, or that they want to look for a higher rate. They start looking for a new job, and then a counter offer will come through. It happens, and depending on how honest you’ve been through the process, you could possibly leave that situation unscathed. The key is to be forthcoming. Being able to communicate is the most important factor in your job search. Whether it’s a specific company, job function, company culture, or salary — it’s really important to share that information with a recruiter or Talent Manager you are working with so that you don’t find yourself in this situation to begin with. It’s important to weigh the factors when you are considering a move so that you make the right moves, and stick with your commitment. 

Stay tuned next week for Part Two as we cover some of the more common mistakes candidates make in juggling multiple job offers, and how best to turn an offer down without burning a bridge.  

How Epic Fail Can Lead to Spectacular Success

How does innovation happen?  The popular conception, arising from our cultural memory of Thomas Edison and the powerful metaphor of his light bulb, is that innovation is a sudden spark of genius. 

But that’s rarely true.  The road to innovation is littered with tiny incremental improvements, outright failure, and, as Edison famously said, “99% perspiration.”

Today’s captivating techno gadgets that seem like overnight successes did not spring, like Athena from Zeus, fully realized from the mind of someone like Steve Jobs.  In fact, the Information Superhighway is strewn with product road kill, whole companies wrecked, and entire industries that crashed and burned.

Some of these spectacular failures are easily recalled. Windows Vista, anyone?

Others, not so much.  Anyone remember the CueCat?

In 2000 I got my CueCat in the mail because I subscribed to the print version of Wired.  Digital Convergence Corporation (DCC) purchased Wired’s mailing list, no doubt at significant venture-funded expense, to mail free CueCats to likely adopters.  I was instructed to plug the CueCat into my PC’s PS/2 port (no, not the USB port!), install software from the CD that came with it, REGISTER, and then presto! I would be able to scan barcodes on advertisements in magazines like Wired, and “automagically” see my browser redirected to a corresponding URL – FOR ANOTHER FREAKING AD.

My reaction:  why the HELL would anyone do this?  It was what we now call an epic fail.  Needless to say it was widely ridiculed, and DCC – along with tens of millions in venture funding and over 100 patents – evaporated into the void. 

And yet…

Fast forward a decade and bar-code scanning is a huge activity among smart-phone users. Didn’t the CueCat prove people can’t be bothered to scan bar codes? Why would something that failed so spectacularly come back so strong? 

It wasn’t the activity that failed, it was DCC’s concept.  They assumed they could hook people with what turned out to be a false convenience.  The huge barriers to adopting the ecosystem far outweighed the burden of typing in a few keystrokes in a browser.  And the supposed benefit – advertising – was something most people considered an annoyance.  It failed on almost every level.

Contrast this with bar-code scanning apps on smartphones, like the Amazon.com app or Google Shopper.  What’s different?

1) Convenience. 
• The CueCat was hugely inconvenient. 
• Smart phone apps are easy to use, and run on a device with much greater built-in capabilities than the CueCat.

2) Context. 
• The CueCat could only be used when you happened to be reading a magazine within 3 feet of your PC.  (Which if you were like me was… um… Oh yeah: NEVER.)
• Anytime you encounter a bar code, you probably also have your smartphone.  Plus, they can scan many different types of barcodes and even recognize products by cover art.  All in seconds, right where you’re standing.

3. User benefit
• The CueCat’ principle purpose was to serve ads.  Very few people actively seek out ads.
• Barcode scanning apps conspicuously don’t serve ads.  In fact, they let you instantly order an item you’re holding in your hand at a better price.  Or learn far more about a product than you can from the packaging. Like reviews to tell you whether it’s a good buy or not. 

So what are some other spectacular tech failures, and how did they lead to the great successes of today?

The GUI and the Xerox PARC

Way before Microsoft Windows and even before the Apple Macintosh, the first computer to come with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) was made by, wait for it… Xerox.  Yes, Xerox.  In 1973!  If you’re a “digital native,” chances are you’re younger than the GUI itself.*

Researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC for short) created a workstation called the Alto, which was basically the first “personal” computer. Before that, computers were shared, meaning you had to book time to use them. The Alto had the graphics and mouse interface we’re familiar with today, and it could print to Laser Printers, also developed at the PARC. Altos at the PARC were even connected to the Internet!  (Well, such as it was. At the time the Internet was a fledgling network of military and educational computers, and the vast majority of its traffic originated within the PARC itself.)

So here’s the “duh” moment: why isn’t Xerox the world’s most valuable company today?  Well, the Xerox leadership back east thought they had no commercial potential.  So Xerox only made a few thousand Altos for internal use at the PARC. 

To be fair, few saw this potential until Apple introduced the personal computer in 1977.  By the time the Xerox Star (which I confess being old enough to have used) came out in 1981, at $20,000 it had no chance against rival PC’s from IBM and Apple that didn’t have GUI’s, but cost ten times less.  It also didn’t help that in 1979 they had given tours of the PARC to Steve Jobs and his team from Apple, who adapted the GUI concept to create the Lisa (itself a failure at nearly $10,000) and ultimately, in 1984, the Macintosh. 

Steve Jobs DID see the potential of the GUI, and now Apple, not Xerox, is among the world’s most valuable companies.  Today, some form of GUI powers just about every digital experience we have.  Without the GUI, no Mac, no Windows, no Web, no Facebook, no Twitter, no YouTube, no smartphones, no tablets. Even flat-screen HDTV’s run a form of GUI. 

Apple Newton

Fresh off the success of the Macintosh in 1987, with Jobs in exile at Next (another brilliant failure that eventually gave us MacOS X and, in part, Pixar), Apple started developing what they considered the next generation of personal computer – the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).  When they eventually brought the Newton Message Pad to market, beginning in late 1993, it was widely ridiculed. And with good reason. It wasn’t in color, its battery life was pathetic, and it’s handwriting recognition… Well, let’s just say that “feature” made lots of money for the creators of Doonesbury and The Simpsons. 

Instead of waiting too long like Xerox did, Apple rushed the Newton to market with too much power at too high a price before many of its features were ready.  It wasn’t long before cheaper PDA’s like the Palm Pilot, with less power but better battery life, and much better handwriting recognition, succeeded where the Newton had failed.  Eventually it occurred to companies like Palm to combine a PDA with a cel phone, which they did with the Treo, arguably the first viable smartphone. 

But it took Steve Jobs’ return to Apple for the smartphone era to really take off.  His innovation this time?  Combine a smartphone with a touch-screen.  No more clumsy stylus and balky handwriting recognition.  Boom – the iPhone.

Windows XP Tablet Edition. 

Speaking of touch-screens, they power the sexiest devices we covet today – smartphones and tablets.  And the idea of a Tablet PC has been around as a concept for a while.  But Microsoft decided to make a huge marketing push to drive Tablet PC adoption beginning in 2001.  Even bigger than the marketing push was the effort and expense of getting PC makers to create the device itself – a laptop with a screen that could fold back over the keyboard and respond to stylus input. 

The market responded with a predictable yawn.  In contrast to the Alto and the Newton, Tablet PC’s were too incremental.  People were happy paying about a thousand dollars for a standard laptop.  Why would they pay almost twice that for a slower laptop, with less battery life, with a touchscreen they couldn’t use at the same time as the keyboard, and with a stylus they were likely to lose?  Handwriting recognition was better, but still awkward and not as fast as typing.  Worse, the Windows Tablet Edition operating system just felt…kludgey.  Some complained it was the same old Windows XP with some stylus input hacks glued on. 

Why did it fail?  Was the public not ready to migrate to touch as an input method?  Well, not exactly.  Most of the problem was that Tablet PC’s were poorly implemented. The GUI, designed for keyboard and mouse-driven PC’s since the days of the Alto, was force-fitted to accommodate a new kind of input.  Worse, stylus-plus-handwriting recognition was simply inefficient as an input method.  And the hardware wasn’t available to fully realize the concept.

Beginning with the iPhone, Apple got several things right with touch screens that the Tablet PC makers didn’t.  First, the OS was built for touch input from the ground up.  Second, Apple completely abandoned the idea of handwriting recognition and stylus input, instead creating an on-screen keyboard you could type directly into, which was much faster.  Third, and most significantly, the hardware (high-sensitivity touch screens) caught up.  Ten years later, iPads are selling so well Apple can’t make them fast enough. 

How can failure lead to success?

So were all these dramatic failures just a waste of time?  Not at all. None of these were utter, complete failures - some of them were even great ideas.  (Well, maybe not the CueCat.)  Most of them had kernels of future success that just needed refinement, or fresh eyes or time for the hardware to catch up.  Yes, there were big winners and big losers, but isn’t that the nature of competition?

Often it’s these near misses that make greater later success possible.  They pave the way for future generations by establishing what works and what doesn’t.  The pain of failure, usually measured in lost millions, is a strong motivator, and forces designers to start over and rethink from the ground up.  If the history of innovation didn’t include stark failure, we wouldn’t have dramatic breakthroughs, just slightly better versions of the same old thing.

Let’s go all the way back to the Xerox PARC.  Most of the innovations that changed our lives and shaped the current world were created there.  In a sense, it was a dramatic success.  And it still exists to this day, providing top-class R&D for companies, universities and governments.  The only thing that failed the PARC was Xerox, the company whose name it bore. 

Then again, perhaps that’s not surprising, considering Xerox’ first successful product routinely burst into flames. http://boingboing.net/2011/04/21/xeroxs-first-success.html 

*(In fact, it was first prototyped at Stanford in the mid 1960’s by Doug Englebart, who showed it to the public during his legendary “Mother of All Demos” in December, 1968.)

What great technology flops and subsequent successes can you think of?  Share your stories in the comments!

As many of you may already know, Microsoft has a rather large, and talented, design community.  Their latest offering is public-facing version of the Toolbox site, a repository of training and resources for creating Silverlight applications in Expression Studio.  Their online courses are totally free, and even include the ability for you to "gain street cred" by completing tutorials and earning badges. For more details, go here:  http://www.microsoft.com/design/toolbox/about/

Recently, Microsoft has started to dabble with a new tagline, “Be What’s Next”.  Intended as an inspirational call-to-action for consumers and developers alike, this resonates with us at Filter.

We know you have to build and deliver what’s next, whether you are a company or a team member supporting the efforts to deliver a product, service or the next big idea.  The very essence of our business is to support you in this mandate and help you get it done.

Companies today are innovating, innovating fast, and looking for ways to get the job done with excellence, expertise and with speed.  Gone are the days of assembling a team over a long period of time as your competition may get to market before your team is assembled.  Markets leaders are extending the enterprise by using outside resources and integrating their supply chains.    This capability is critical if companies are to avoid capacity issues (workload stacking up) and expertise issues (lacking the needed skill for the job).

How do you extend the enterprise to avoid capacity and expertise issues and ultimately gain a speed advantage?  The model for this has changed significantly in the past few years. Some may use a design and development agency when they have a need, another may use contracted staff or consulting services to balance their teams, and others may outsource production services to handle high-volume tasks.  The most sophisticated companies use a strategic mix of all of the above.

Filter has pioneered a hybrid model that enables companies to access these offerings in any combination, using a flexible system.   Ultimately, it takes talented individuals to create What’s Next, and companies need to be free to access that talent on a flexible basis using the vendor model best suited to the need at hand.  Filter’s strategy is to offer the best platform for connecting the companies with a need to the talent with the expertise and capacity.

We have been on the forefront of the creative and technology industries and have participated in the boom of demand for user experience design, prototyping, mobile, cross platform application development,  Our service offering includes staffing of onsite resource, staff augmentation service for onsite or offsite consulting, and digital services for projects and production services.  In essence, these are all talent delivery services, each using a different structure and pricing model.  If our clients want to hire an agency that already has the expertise assembled, we can provide that solution, or if they need to augment their team with staffing solutions onsite at their location, Filter can supply that talent.  Each solution is fashioned to fit the needs and requirements of our customer.

It’s a new world of work today, and with thousands of creative and innovative minds under one virtual roof, we help our customers get it done.  We exist to help you “Be What’s Next” so that you don’t “Be What’s Late to Market”.

If you’re ever uncertain about how much uncertainty impacts business, just talk to someone who creates content for a living.  In the last decade, no sector of the economy has been disrupted more. And the reason the recorded music and print publication businesses have virtually collapsed is well documented – they failed to adapt to sweeping technological change. 

The creative services business, by contrast, has a long history of adapting well to change.  Media as a delivery mechanism has been in flux for the better part of a century.  This has forced purveyors of creative services to innovate and develop new methods, techniques and procedures to deliver creative products for new media.  Their success may be because the nature of the creative endeavor requires a certain skill – the ability to assimilate inherent conflict, uncertainty and ambiguity.

Creativity and Ambiguity

If you’re a creative professional, you’ve likely been confronted by ambiguity often.  Sometimes your goal has been to extinguish this ambiguity.  But more and more, ambiguity is an unavoidable part of design. Things just move too quickly, and are too complex, for full certainty in the practice of design. 

Ambiguity may be a condition that persists during the design process, or it may be manifest in design itself. Let’s talk about the former first. 

Ambiguity in the design process can take many, many forms.  It can arise from a deficit of requirements, a lack of clarity in defining requirements or lack of consensus on what requirements ought to be.  It can arise from flawed communication between the customer and the designer, or among different functional groups within a design team.  It can arise from project realities, such as lack of time or access to critical information about the project.  It can arise from a lack of preparation or research.  It can arise from technical complexity.  It can arise from choices and tradeoffs designers must make where there’s no clear or obvious solution.  It can even arise from process itself, for instance when design iteration introduces ambiguity about requirements that were previously thought to be clear.

Ambiguity in this context is almost always considered a risk that threatens success.  But it’s also common and nearly impossible to avoid. 

Teams that confront ambiguity must ask themselves how best to manage it, how the negative effects of ambiguity should be mitigated, and if it’s possible to use it to their advantage.  Without inevitable ambiguities, if every project were managed as a rigid march to inalienable requirements, the discovery that’s inherent in design wouldn’t have an opportunity to flourish.  Innovation can be uncomfortable, but if the end result is a better product, users of the product will benefit.

Now let’s talk about ambiguity that’s manifest in the design itself.  This kind of ambiguity actually has much more potential to be positive. 

Almost no digital product is created entirely to serve machines.  There’s almost always a human end user, even when there are layers of machine interactions between the provider and consumer of a product.  And humans are notoriously imprecise.  Ambiguity, both of thought and of purpose, is a fundamental facet of the human condition. 

Designers of digital products and services increasingly must confront this reality by accommodating human ambiguity in the design itself.  This is not just a question of acknowledging the impossibility of predicting all possible use cases.  Designing for ambiguity means creating dynamic systems that adapt.

An Example of Designing for Ambiguity

There’s an instructive recent example of designing for ambiguity that could have a profound impact on a common behavior that has become an integral part of most people’s lives – Internet search.

Google recently introduced a product they call Instant.  Before Instant, every Internet search engine featured a common basic interface – enter text into a form field and click a button.  But what if you didn’t know what you wanted?  What if you thought you knew but weren’t sure?  In other words, what if your goal was ambiguous?

With a seemingly minor interface tweak – results now populate with each character typed - Google has made the search interaction model profoundly more dynamic. If you goal is ambiguous, no problem, just start typing, and the predictive search engine will start guessing what you want.

This design accommodates ambiguity much more efficiently and holistically than the standard but aging design it replaced.  Users can explore the meaning space around what they are seeking instead of having to guess what will produce the correct result.  You might find something you didn’t know you were looking for.  You might find many things closely related to your original thought that deepen your understanding of it. 

Strategies for Accommodating Ambiguity

As a design professional, or an organization that practices design, it pays to embrace ambiguity, or at least confront it head-on.   Here are some tips:

• Focus on goals.  As a precision discipline, task analysis is comfortingly scientific.  But goal-directed design is a better way to accommodate and provide for ambiguities in execution and implementation.
• Iterate a lot.  Iterative design surfaces both ambiguities and the design solutions that can accommodate them.
• Launch and layer. As Google Instant shows, there’s always room for innovation – even with the most successful and mature products and services.  Incorporate that philosophy into the launch process by getting the product in front of users early so they can show you how to refine it.  Expect that the design will not be perfect at launch, provide for continuous improvement.
• Build adaptable systems that don’t force users down a single path.
• What happens offline is just as important as what happens online.  When designing, think about the entirety of the interaction, not just the part that the system or application facilitates.
• Design for ecosystems that are composed of many different applications and subsystems.  Users don’t always perceive themselves interacting with a specific system as much as they perceive themselves as agents within an ecosystem.

Ambiguity is inevitable and it’s not going away.  In fact, it will very likely increase as technology evolves.  Innovations like Google Instant will introduce their own new ambiguities that will require adjustment and adaptation.  So the cycle continues; innovations will spawn myriad new design challenges, each of which represents an opportunity for a designer comfortable with ambiguity.

How does your organization address ambiguity?  We’d love to compare notes, hear feedback or exchange tips in the comments, or on twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Khoi Vinh has been touting Grid Layouts for years. From his efforts there have been many, many solutions to helping people use Grid layouts successfully. Thanks to a brilliant idea of Jon Hicks and code execution by Teevio, Grid Layout JS is now available.

The Grid Layout Javascript enables web-developers to stick to a Grid Layout quickly and simply by including the Grid Layouts Javascript file and simple XHTML code. Currently, the Grid Layouts Javascript relies on jQuery.

Additional resources for grid layouts:

• The Grid System : an ever-growing resource where graphic designers can learn about grid systems, the golden ratio and baseline grids.
• Myths and Misconceptions about Grid Systems

It’s become a cliché in today’s marketing landscape that the only constant is change.  It’s also widely recognized that since the Internet became a fixture in business environments during the mid and late 1990’s, the rate of change has shifted into a higher gear.  In the decade just completed, a further wave of innovation led by widespread consumer adoption of social media has permanently altered the landscape in the direction of openness and transparency. 

The era when businesses could tightly control their relationships with their constituents is quite simply over, and it’s not coming back.

What’s less obvious, but just as profound, is how businesses and professionals must adapt to these new realities by changing the way they work together.  We’re in the midst of an inexorable shift in the dominant workflow paradigm away from from large, centralized, tightly controlled initiatives, to smaller, more ad-hoc and distributed teams that can be more nimble, innovative and productive. Today’s more fluid, less centralized environment demands a more collaborative, less hierarchical approach to digital property development.

Collaboration vs. Control - A Long Running Debate

In digital production, the tension between collaboration and control has a history that dates back to the dawn of computing.  In his pioneering essay, The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks describes the challenges he faced managing a software development project all the way back in the early 1960’s.  Many of Brooks’ observations (the oft-repeated production aphorism “9 women can’t make a baby in a month” originated here) are eerily prescient and just as true today as they were half a century ago.

Later, at about the dawn of the Web, Eric Raymond’s landmark essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar described a nascent open-source software movement that upended traditional assumptions about what distributed, decentralized teams of like-minded developers could accomplish when they collaborated over the Internet.  Raymond argued that tight control over development teams and source code actually undermined innovation and efficiency.  Now entering its third decade, the collaboration style popularized during the open source software revolution is a central component of Google’s success, and arguably has even influenced traditionally tightly controlled businesses like Apple and Microsoft.

This shift has reached perhaps its most extreme expression in businesses that are explicitly contrarian in their approach to product development.  37 Signals, for example, advocates principles that seem counterintuitive, such as “meetings are toxic,” “separate your team members from each other,” or “don’t ever let more than 5 people work on anything.”  Founder Jason Fried paints this in the starkest terms: “Collaboration and control are like oil and water.  They don’t mix.”

Parallel Trends

It’s still true that projects should be carefully managed, but there are new and evolving methods that can free teams from rigidly defined roles and responsibilities resulting in increased productivity and innovation.  There are a variety of trends that parallel the shift from control to collaboration.  Agile development, user-centered design, telecommuting, the transformation of office applications to cloud-hosted multi-user collaboration tools (for example Windows Live Office and Google Docs) are all manifestations of this shift. 

There is also a strong generational component to this shift.  Called “digital natives” by some authors, the first generation that grew up with the Internet is just starting to hit the workforce in numbers significant enough to influence it’s makeup.  As a group, digital natives seem to be less motivated by traditional rewards and measures of success.  They operate with an attitude of abundance because the commoditization of intellectual property has made barriers to innovation lower and access to powerful technology more widespread.  With their high-degree of participation in social media, collaboration comes naturally to them.

Businesses looking for a road map for how to succeed in this new environment would do well to recognize the new reality and move away from control and toward collaboration.  There are a variety of things to consider when making this shift, but the key is not to be afraid of relaxing control. Collaboration doesn’t mean lack of discipline - often truly collaborative teams are highly disciplined and structured, but a collaborative, iterative process is at the center of this structure - agile development methodologies are an instructive example.

  •      Hire people with varied skill sets.  Information workers with multiple skills (who are beginning to be called “multi-disciplinarians,”) thrive in collaborative environments.  Because many of them are self-taught and have learned on the job, they have the ability to sense where their contributions are complementary, when to lead and when to let others lead, and how to fit in just right to make a team well-balanced and high-functioning.   

•      Collaboration works better with small, narrowly focused teams.  Smaller teams, by default, require less communication, less policy, and less procedure.  They tend to manage themselves.  This lack of encumbrance allows them to move more quickly and respond to change more rapidly.  This is not to say that control works better with larger teams, or that tightly controlled teams can’t produce great things.  But breaking up large projects into smaller chunks run by smaller teams can reduce risk.  

•      Collaboration works better with a more iterative process. By now, many have heard about the perils of the “waterfall” process, where decisions or mistakes early in a process can be difficult to undo down the road.  An iterative approach can not only reduce this risk, but can also promote collaboration.  Instead of involving different team members at different stages, mini-cycles involving the whole team get everyone in synch quickly and reduce the potential for disastrous disagreements and misunderstandings.  Roles and a team collaboration culture take shape, and problems get ironed out during early cycles, so they don’t persist.  And there’s just something about meeting a series of smaller deadlines instead of one big one that promotes the collaborative spirit. 

•      Collaboration is a better solution for multi-stakeholder projects where communication and process overhead can be a drag on productivity.  When there are multiple stakeholders both within and outside of an organizations, complexities can proliferate. In such situations, misaligned goals and competing, or even conflicting agendas can make tight, hierarchical control unfeasible.  But it also increases risk, because the more elaborate a system of control is, the harder it is to fix when it breaks down.   

•      Companies should consider their customers collaborators. Social media tools have made listening to customers easier.  But its quickly becoming a necessity.  Moving forward, to truly differentiate, businesses will need to engage in real collaboration with customers, integrating them into the product and service development process as much as possible. In the realm of digital products, user-centered design methods such as ethnographic research and live prototype testing are proven ways to bake customer input directly into development. 

Finally, thriving in collaborative environments requires suppressing the ego.  Good ideas can come from anywhere.  When all constituents can see evidence that their input matters, they take their contributions more seriously.  And the days of the “big idea” are over.  Most great products don’t come from a big idea rammed through by a big ego - they come from teams that have trained themselves to come up with small, but innovative ideas constantly, because they’ve mastered the art of collaboration.

As marketing is increasingly dominated by digital delivery channels – and as the separation between marketing, product management, customer communication and content continues to blur – businesses are skill-challenged.  Most initiatives now have a strong digital component.  Yet top digital talent is truly difficult to find.

“Hire an expert” is the clarion call of some enterprises, which are typically dominated by boomer-generation managers who came into this world before television was invented.  Try as they might, many of these leaders do not have the digital DNA to adapt quickly to developing technologies and digital opportunities.  When Twitter broke onto the scene in 2007, there were no Twitter experts to hire!  When Microsoft developed and launched the now-defunct Kin mobile phone, presumably they hired nothing but mobile experts.  Yet they still failed to bring a successful product to market.

Hiring an expert is not a solution to the digital conundrum.  Instead, organizations must focus on their process and the efficacy of their talent and their teams.

Digital is Difficult! 

As if the pace of change in technology and resultant marketing channels is not enough of a challenge, the world of work is changing too.  How, when and where work is done has changed dramatically in the last ten years.  We have four generations working together who bring a vastly different and wide range of values and expectations. Millennials have grown up digital, with productivity tools, social and mobile communication a central part of their lives nearly from birth. Their expectations about work and the way they blend work, life, personal interests, and learning are unprecedented.

The brains of these so-called Digital Natives are well-adapted to these technological and social changes.  But the organizational structures of the companies they work for are not so well adapted. Herein lies the challenge and the opportunity.

Being Digital: Critical Success Factors

Hard work, brains, maturity and luck still play major roles in the successful digital professional as they have through the ages.  But, in my experience, there are certain key skills that top digital talent has, and these skills enable them to thrive and be successful almost regardless of the team they are playing on or the product they are supporting.  Hire more of these talented dynamos, and you will magnify your success – overlook them because they lack “expertise” and you may doom yourself to a series of failures.

These skills include multidisciplinarianism, true collaboration skills, and the willingness to fail.  Let’s focus on Multidisciplinarianism for the remainder of this article, and we’ll cover other key skills in future editions. 

Dubbed the Digital M.D., this person has a variety of skills and interests.  They have a well-balanced perspective on problems (and solutions). They are grounded in a strong customer-centric sensibility, and have strong enough people skills that they are able to articulate goals and ideas in a common sense, practical fashion.  The Digital M.D. probably also has a variety of interesting outside interests, perhaps in the arts or volunteer groups, since they are constantly learning.

In fact, the single, strongest asset of the Digital M.D. is that they constantly seek to learn new things and are really, really, good at learning.  Thus armed, they are prepared to meet the technological challenge of each changing day without stress, fear or trepidation.  In fact, they look forward to change because it presents the opportunity to learn new things!

The Multidisciplinarian probably has been a designer at some point.  They are visually oriented – they pay attention to the visual presentation of things and are familiar with the tools used in the design trade.  But the Digital M.D. has also probably done some light programming or scripting and is familiar with development methodologies and tools.  Many of them have lots of experience bringing new software products through development and to market, so they’ve been exposed to marketing principles, channels and tactics.  Because of this, they’ve also learned the basics about SEO/SEM, especially as it informs site architecture and information design.  If you are lucky, the Digital M.D. might also be a subject matter expert in one or more content areas or industry verticals, just for good measure.

Put this Designer-Developer (“Devigner”) on a team for one of your key initiatives, and you will likely find that they are able to help streamline the development process and avoid a lot of landmines.  Without a Digital M.D, on the team, you may find the UX designer can’t communicate with the Developer, and neither of them can communicate effectively with the end-user customer to quickly identify the need and a successful solution.

In short, having a team of strong contributors in each discipline is still a fine way to go, but they will be even more effective if they have strong inter-disciplinary skills or, ideally, are led by a true Digital M.D.

Five years ago, what was then known as a “graphic designer” could succeed by building even one set of skills in one industry, for example doing newsletter design in the financial services industry.  Today, even the term “graphic designer” connotes an unduly limited skill set, even without that singular industry focus.  Today, even that newsletter designer (who is now doing electronic newsletters rather than print), must know a little bit about user experience principles, opt-in/opt-out methodologies and the federal spam laws, SEO/SEM and analytics, development challenges in getting newsletters to render properly in various email clients and browsers, mobile design for users viewing the newsletter on their mobile phone, the list goes on.

The designer having solely these newsletter skills would not qualify as a Digital M.D.  They would qualify as a good digital designer in the newsletter space.  The Digital M.D. would have these skills plus experience and skills to address all the other marketing channels of which the newsletter campaign is but one part.

Learning to Learn

This skill shift is about more than just “broadening your skills”.  It’s about learning to learn.  Technology changes constantly.  That changes our jobs.  The ability to learn, and to embrace the change that comes with learning, is core for the digital professional.

Millennials have this skill natively, so they have an inside track toward success.  If they can combine this advantage with professional dedication and proficiency, they have the potential to become Multidisciplinarians.  But the outcome is not a given.

In the marketing and design space, there has always been a role for “creativity”.  Thinking outside of the box, coming up with the killer idea ...  This need still exists and there is still a shortage of true creativity.  But it’s not enough to have a killer idea.  In digital, it’s about rapid, clever and successful execution.  Money can’t buy success.  People – the talent within the enterprise – bring about success.

In the Digital Renaissance, the Digital M.D. is king.  They can go anywhere, add value and gain job security because of their wide-ranging skills.    

What is a Multidisciplinarian (or what we like to call a Digital MD)? A Digital MD knows something about design and development, about SEO/SEM and marketing, about user experience and usability testing, about the logistics of product launch.  True Digital MDs are the utility player on a baseball team.  They can play any position on the field.

I've always been a fan of information design and data visualization — I will even go so far as to admit that I'm a Tufte fan and a closet Excel geek.  The visualization of data was one of the first things that drew me to a career in Design. 

I can remember sitting in my father's study flipping through issues of National Geographic or US News & World Report and staring for hours at the charts, models, and infographics therein, occassionally interrupting my father's focus with random comments like "hey Dad, did you know that from [some date] to [some other date] there was [some datapoint] increase of [something] production in [some country]?" 

The details of those moments have long faded (what do you expect? I was 7...) but what stayed with me for years was the intrigue those visuals held:  all that information, elegantly distilled into a collective of shapes, forms, and colors that told a story in such a compelling and approachable way that even I could wrap my 2nd-grade brain around it.  A powerful methodology to say the least. 

Since then, I have been a fan and student of Information Design, and I hold those who have mastered this discipline in very high regard.  Those with the ability to turn "data" into "story" are a rare breed.  Even today, I still aspire to improve my own skills (and encourage others to do the same) in this realm by seeking out best-in-breed examples and picking the brains of these aforementioned "masters" whenever possible.  To this end, I thought I'd share a collection of information design experiences from the in-house design team at the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/newsgraphics/2009/ona/index.html

What are some of your favorite examples of Information Design?  Send us a comment and let us know (especially if it's your work)!